As if wind, solar arrays, hydro, transfer stations aren’t?

It's difficult to export culture when the receiving cultures don't speak the language, don't share religion, etc. US has a big benefit of being part of the Anglophone world going back to it's founding and more recently with Western European dominance from WW2 where basically everyone there knows some level of English. Also, don't forget China has suffered from great "humiliation" for the last few hundred years and hasn't been in much of a position to export much of anything until recently. Furthermore, the main reason the US has absorbed some SK and Japanese cultural things is we brought them into our neoempire.

It is also the way we keep score in America.

Kids in America are hopelessly addicted to Tiktok but that doesn't count as a cultural export.

Most the items in people's homes are made in China but that doesn't count either.

Chinese rappers could be dominating the pop charts and we would just say rap was invented in America so that doesn't count.

All the American kids could be learning to play the guzheng and we would just say we invented a new American style of playing the guzheng, doesn't count.

K-pop from Korea, Anime / mangas from Japan, are example of asian cultural worldwide successes

Having a school lunch in a "poor" former eastern block country as a guest was really eye opening. It was actually good, fresh made borscht, veg dishes that tasted good (wasn't steamed)! Like, I would order and enjoy it at a restaurant level no-bad. Who knew that was even possible? From what I can tell, a non-crappy school lunch is the norm all over Europe. Why can't America have that?

Unfortunately it's far from the norm in Europe.

In the Netherlands there's no school lunch available. Families need to provide it to their children. The norm is just bread and cheese sandwich and milk, doesn't matter how rich you are. That's what most adults eat for lunch too.

fwiw, bread and cheese in the Netherlands kicks the crap out of what is often called "cheese" in the US. However, the situation has at least improved over the past decade if your budget allows it.

You can't afford to have people cook food here, just reheat it.

"can't afford" in this case is a choice to spend the absolute minimum possible on school lunches.

And despite spending basically nothing on that lunch, we still charge kids for it

The public blamed the "lazy" lunch ladies of course but the public was the one voting down the school budget to actually pay them to cook. The actual people doing food service have as much agency over the menu as the teen behind the counter at mcdonalds. Those exact same women WERE cooking real food a decade ago. That's how long they had been doing that job.

The usual truth is that labor costs more in the US than it does anywhere else. A lot of things are just what you get if you have cheap labor. As an example, all over South Asia you can get top-notch personal cooking and cleaning on a daily basis. In the US you cannot. It's because everyone is rich in the US. The embodied cost of labor in everything you get is quite a large fraction.

The median household income in Poland is a quarter that of the US.

The labor costs more because other assets cost more — namely, housing, food, clothing.

Indeed. And wet roads cause rain.

American school lunches were big-ag industrial complex garbage well before Dubbya was in office.

You might want to check out: https://www.pgflow.dev

github copilot somewhat does this.

Copilot is too stingy with context. In my experience Claude Code is much better at seeing the big picture.

Why in the world do people choose Mongo over Postgres? I'm legit curious. Is it inexperience? Javascript developers who don't know backend or proper data modeling (or about jsonb)? Is this type of decision coming down from non-technical management? Are VCs telling their portfolio companies what to use so they have something to burn their funding on? It's just really confounding, especially when there's even mongo-api compatible Postgres solutions now. Perhaps I'm just not webscale and too cranky.

Personally I've found it faster to build using mongo cause you don't need to worry about schemas. You get 32mb per document and you can work out your downstream processing later, e.g. cleanup and serve to postgres, file, wherever. This data is a big data dump that's feeding ML models so relational stuff is not that important.

You definitely do have to worry about a schema. Except it’s ill defined and scattered across your business logic.

I used to build personal projects like this, but after Postgres got JSONB support I haven't found any reason to not just start with Postgres. There's usually a couple of tables/columns you want a proper schema for, and having it all in Postgres to begin with makes it much easier to migrate the schemaless JSONB blobs later on.

Their JSONB impl is not equivalent in terms of write isolation.

It depends on your use case, and RDBMS isn't the best option for all needs. Mongo's approach is pretty useable. That said, there are alternatives, you can get very similar characteristics, though a more painful devex out of say CockroachDB with (key:string, value: JSONB) tables.

The only thing I really don't care for is managing Mongo... as a developer, using it is pretty joyous assuming you can get into the query mindset of how to use it.

Also, if you're considering Mongo, you might also want to consider looking at Cassandra/ScyllaDB or CockroachDB as alternatives that might be a better fit for your needs that are IMO, easier to administer.

We've been using mongodb for the past 8 years. What we like:

- schema-less: we don't have to think about DDL statements at any point.

- oplog and change streams as built-in change data capture.

- it's dead simple to setup a whole new cluster (replica set).

- IMO you don't need a designated DBA to manage tens of replica sets.

- Query language is rather low-level and that makes performance choices explicit.

But I have to admit that our requirements and architecture play to the strength of mongodb. Our domain model is neatly described in a strongly typed language. And we use a sort of event sourcing.

IMHO it's because so many people take decisions in rush. e.g. let's not design database, put whatever data shape we came ip in alpha version and see where it goes. Sometimes people favor one particular technology because every other startup chose it.

To be quite honest today's software engineering sadly is mostly about addressing 'how complex can we go' rather than 'what problem are we trying to solve'.

> Why in the world do people choose Mongo over Postgres?

I'm using on a project not by choice. It was chosen already when I joined the project and the more we develop the project the more I feel Postgres would be a better fit but I don't think we can change it now

> Why in the world do people choose Mongo over Postgres?

Postgrtes distributed story is more complicated.

I'll repeat it again: you don't always want a relational database. Sometimes you need a document-oriented one. It matches quite a lot of use cases, e.g. when there aren't really interesting relations, or when the structures are very deep. That can be really annoying in SQL.

> when there's even mongo-api compatible Postgres solutions

With their own drawbacks.

I'd probably use a jsonfield in postgres for data that i knew was going to be unstructured. meanwhile, other columns can join and have decent constraints and indexes.

> Sometimes you need a document-oriented one.

Like a file system?

maybe instead of communicating how dumb you think people are for choosing mongo, communicate why you think it’s so dumb

I've read a lot more about "how dumb it is to use mongo over PG" than the opposite, I think the burden of proof is on the mongo-lovers these days (not that anyone has to prove anything to randos on the internet)

Why mongo is dumb has been written up about ad nauseam - from data modeling and quality issues, out of control costs, etc. It's been a known toxic dumpsterfire for well over a decade...

I’ll bite, what’s your product. I’m always interested in these types of platforms.

Those are static site providers. For actual server paas that can run docker containers, render.com and fly.io are what heroku could have evolved to.

Huh? Solar is getting produced now in larger quantities than ever. And people are finally warming to the idea of nuclear again.

Globally, solar hasn’t even started to look like it might want to consider putting a dent in fossil fuel usage.

There are three big GHG emitting sectors, electricity, transport, and agriculture, and solar has only started to scratched the surface in a handful of countries electricity production.

The scale of solar / wind rollout necessary to make a significant impact globally is truly stupendous.

Look at this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Australia

The more solar and wind you have, the more gas you need.

Batteries, the ones that haven’t even been built yet, are only at hours-of-capacity scale. We need weeks of backup capacity, which is why we need gas.